So you just created some walks on your phone and you want to walk – phone in your bag, just guided by your watch.

How to get walks on the watch?

It happens automatically, but…

• TrackGuide must be open on your watch to receive the walks.
• If you just finished intalling TrackGuide on a watch that did not have TrackGuide before, it might take some time (minutes) before watch and phone are on speaking terms. If you see nothing appearing on your watch, just wait some minutes and try again.

Whenever you create or delete a walk on your phone, the list of walks is sent to the Watch. The watch then removes walks no longer present on the phone from its database and adds the new ones. This is done just for the walks. Trackpoints, interesting points, pictures etc… are not send over with the walklist. You can bring them over when you need them on your watch by a simple tap on a button though.

To force this synchronisation, you can drag the walktable down on your phone and let go. Still no walks on you watch? Wait a few minutes and try again. Phone and Watch need some negotiation time before they can talk to each other. But once they do, it just works.

The Watch App

Main interface

the main interface of the app shows a list of all the walks it knows about. It should contain exactly the same walks as the linked iPone. The list is ordered closest walks first. If your watch does not have a GPS fix (yet), the distancefield shows “=> 100 km” and its color will be red instead of green. The red color is also used for walks further than 30 km away. You have to move closer to start them on your watch.

For every walk, this interface shows

• Its name
• How far you are way from its startingpoint. When the screenshot above was taken, we were only 8 meters separated from the start of a walk named “Brussel-Noord” (a walk generated by TrackGuide phoneApp from our current position the the trainstation named “Brussel Noord”. )
• The total length of the walk. To get to the North Station, we had to walk 1.11 kilometers.

Summary of a walk

Tap a walk in the list, and the interface below opens (we tapped a walk named ‘Citadel Lille’, a walk around the old fortifications of the city of Lille, North France) :

(a walk is just like Tom Thumbs breadcrumb trail : a list of points to pass one by one. Each point is called a trackpoint) If the trackpoints are not yet brought over from your phone, you see a big red ‘Synchronize’ buton. Tap it and the points come over. The phone app must not be started, but your phone must be close to the watch. If your walk contains lots of photos, this synchronisation can take several minutes. When finished…

…”Synchronize” becomes “Walk”, the number op trackpoints appears and the buttons “Reload” and “Clear” are added to the inteface.

• Tap “Reload” to refresh the trackpoints on your watch with the points on your phone.Might be usefull when
  • You added or removed points on your phone, or you added or modified POI’s (interesting points with pictures) or instructions on your phone. “Synchronize” brings over the latest modifications.
  • If the walk was generated by the phone (from your current position to some point), the phone will recalculate the walk from your new location before sending them.
• Tap clear to remove the points from your watch. Saves memory, and you can always re-synchronize later.
• Tap ‘Walk’ when you start your walk.
• Tap “<” (top left) to go back to the main interface..

Walking

The maps come from Apple – or which you need a 4G connection. The walk-interface shows your current position (blue circle in the middle), the point you just passed (red arrow), the point you should to to (green arrow) and the 2 points you have to pass next. If TrackGuide has some extra info on a point, a little blue flag is added to it. Other elements of this interface are

• The title area shows the distance to the end of the walk. It is updated whenever you pass a point. Still 0.84 km to go on the screenshot above.
• Just below the time, you see a blue arrow showing what to do when you reach the next points. If that arrow points 27° to the right, have to go 27° to the right at that point.
• Just before the blue arrow, you see the distance left to that point. So in 43 meter, we’ll arriving at the next trackpoint where we should slightly turn right. Note that the blue arrow is a rotated version of the green one.

Be aware: TrackGuide considers the green point as reached when the distance between the point and your GPS-position is less than 12 meter. It does so to compensate for bad GPS reception between tall buildings (GPS readings always seems to lag). The 12 meters can be changed in the settings window of the phone app.

The blue dot in the middle…

… is you. Attached to that dot are two arrows :

• The blue arrow shows where you are heading to on the maps. Looks as we are following the yellow road.
• The green arrow tells us which direction to go in the real world if we want to reach the green arrow given the current GPS position. Left is left, right is right, up if straight ahead and down is U-turn. As our current GPS postion is not on the track, but rather inside the buildings on the right of the road, the green arrow points slightly to the left.
• The blue dot is filled with red ink if the error margin to the GPS measurements have a large error margin.
• The little ‘5’ in the center of the circle indicates we are heading to point number 5 (the first point has number 0). Take it as a vision test.

Points with flags

There are 3 types of flagged points : below an example of each :

This info is shown as soon as you reach a flagged point. If not – bad GPS reception is everywhere – just tap the watch interface to bring it up.

If more than one interesting point is attached to a trackpoint (a square with a cathedral, some guild houses and a statue…), you can swipe through them. White dots at the bottom of this interface indicate the number of points.